The WS Society is fortunate to have been able to count many scholars amongst its members over its centuries of existence. This has been true particularly for history and legal history, with the autumn greeting the latest WS contribution in the form of a paper from the University of Dundee’s Tom Edwards, a former Signet Summer Scholar, published in the Edinburgh Student Law Review from the University of Edinburgh.

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Edwards’ paper returns to the source of Scots Law and reconsiders the 1681 first edition of Stair’s Institutions of the Law of Scotland, reasserting the primacy and importance of its legal taxonomy to the survival and subsequent blossoming of Scots Law.

Edwards analyses the structure of Stair’s work in detail and discusses the extraordinary birth of the Institutions (which circulated in manuscript form for almost two decades prior to final printing in 1681, as the Signet Library’s Burnside, Anderson and Smyth manuscripts of Stair’s Institutions bear witness).